Music Research Group

This cross-disciplinary research group brings together researchers whose work encompasses music or sound in any of its material, performative, aural, social and cultural manifestations.  

Postgraduates, early career researchers and established academics from any discipline are welcome with members currently spanning Music, History, American Studies, English Literature, Art History, Film, Dance, Performing Arts, and Computer and Information Sciences. 

Members’ research is chronologically broad, stretching from medieval Spain to contemporary British composers. Key themes and interests include: 

• Medieval Song 
• Music in Early Modern England 
• Performance Practice and Editing 
• 17th-19th-Century Black Musicians, and Musical Cultures of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation 
• 19th-Century Opera 
• 20th and 21st-Century British Composers, including Tippett, Cardew, Anderson 
• Anglo-American Popular Music and the Recording Industry 
• Material Culture including Print, Manuscripts and Instruments 
• Music and Medicine/ Health/ Disability 
• Music and the City 
• Music and Politics 
• Music, Myth and Literature 
• Sound studies and Sound Art 
• Community Music  
• Art Education and Popular Music 

Currently funded research projects by members include David Smith’s AHRC-funded network, ‘Digital directions for collected editions: keyboard music by British musicians before c.1700’ and Paul Vickers’s Leverhulme Trust Project ‘A radical new interdisciplinary space for sonification’. 

For further information about the group and its activities - or to join the group - please contact the current convenor, Dr Francesca Vella: francesca.vella@northumbria.ac.uk